The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity is a new Chinese fantasy show distributed by Netflix. Is it worth watching?
The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity is ultimately a flashy fantasy film with a budget of 50 million dollars, based on Chinese novels. At first glance, you can quickly see the potential of the represented world, its rules or the issue of showing the magic of Yin-Yang masters. This is something fresh and intriguing in the fantasy genre, but these are generalities that look good on paper or in a trailer that get overwhelmed by a fatal scenario.
The biggest problem with The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity is the story itself and its running. Instead of a fantasy movie about the fight between magic masters and an evil demon in an adventure form, we first get a bizarre crime story on the principle: "who killed one of the masters in a closed space?". Perhaps it would not be so bad if it were not for the terrible directing, which in the first scene even screams at the viewer: Look, this is a villain and a culprit. The "investigation" itself is a series of clichés. It is not known what the exact intentions of the creators were. The whole story largely centers on the relationship between masters Bayo and Qingming, which is closer to romance than friendship. It is ambiguous and cannot be resonated with real emotions. All the actions of the character are accompanied by terrifying boredom.
Most of the movie is blank and artificially extended. The worst, however, is that when the director reveals the cards of the obviousness of his plot, the reality becomes cruelly sloppy and gloomy in it. The emerging love themes resemble a bad fan story about an empty teenage feeling. This is so terribly superficial as to be artificial. It is hard to believe because everything is so teary that it is indigestible. We are talking about the whole basis of this story, which takes up most of this film, so it is necessarily closer to a kitschy melodrama (where Fashion for Success is the depth of love dilemmas), not a fantasy show.
There is no denying, however, that when it comes to the action scenes, you can see the budget and nice ideas. We have a lot of magic, demons, a giant evil serpent and Soul Guardians with superpowers who fight showy battles. The trouble is, while it looks nice (although it's not the level of computer effects like in Wandering Earth), it's not enough. We have some action in the beginning and in the climax - except that the latter is spoiled by a whole sour background. In addition, you get the impression that the finale is devoid of emotions. We have scenes of a serpent demon crawling through the Imperial City and fighting the Yin-Yang masters ... It should be glamorous and exciting like a superhero fight in New York, and it's strangely boring and empty. At least it looks nice, and in the back is played by the atmospheric music of Kenji Kawai, who is well known to fans of the anime Ghost in The Shell.
The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity promised to be a fresh and imaginative fantasy movie, drawing heavily on Chinese culture. Instead, we get a boring, kitschy plot and sweet melodrama, which at the same time wastes the enormous potential of this story. It is difficult to recommend it even to the greatest fans of Asian cinema, let alone to viewers who are not familiar with the peculiarities of this cinema..
